Donald Trump’s other big disaster
If you’re still a capitalist then you haven’t been paying attention. When I say “capitalist” I’m not referring to individual entrepreneurs. More power to anyone who starts up an original business that’s both useful and profitable. I’m not talking about that capitalism. I’m referring to the capitalism that began this whole deregulating, laissez-faire, privileged tax break, bailout, stock buyback, trickle down mess we are in right now. The one that has so completely enriched the 1% as to leave the 99% bereft of hope, income and resources in this time of crisis.
I’m referring to a capitalism that oversaw a failed system that thinks it can buy its way out of the chaos it permitted with a $1000 check, a measly tip. I’m referring to a capitalism that turns its empty pockets inside out and shrugs with amused indifference because it just endowed most of a permanent gift of 1.5 trillion dollars to a bloated class of super rich, while giving the lesser portion to a vanishing middle class in an election year, then whipped it away like a magician’s scarf the very next year.
I’m referring to a capitalism that is cruel, bloated and mocking, a system that blames then crushes its victims underfoot, and sends them the cleaning bill for the blood on its boots. I’m referring to a system with the smug, self-important countenance of Jared Kushner, full of corporate double-talk and doublethink, with a mouth that speaks nothing with the angry, quasi-literate, incoherent voice of the child rapist Donald Trump, and the slit-eyed, indifferent, cold, fading beauty of Melania. I’m talking about “A shape with lion body and the head of a man/A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.” I’m talking about a beast, a pestilence, a mocking, supercilious, conceited monster. I’m talking about a devouring darkness. That is the capitalism I mean.
I’m talking about a system of power and money so cynical and so calculating as to co-opt an eager class of corrupt evangelicals and endow it with, as its most recent gift, the very antichrist it spent the last fifty years warning us against. A system that then dangles before that evangelical class the golden key of promise of The Second Coming — four more years in the belly of the beast. A system that whispers the seductive siren song of power and money.
If you’re still that kind of capitalist then you haven’t been paying attention — or you’re evil and corrupt and cynical yourself. Meanwhile, as things fall apart, while the center cannot hold, while anarchy is loosed upon the world, we have been given one final chance out of this. A chance to disavow the destruction that this alt-right capitalism, this monstrous greed, is leading to. We can unite in a single voice with a single will and throw off this evil once and for all in November. Will you join us? And, as ever, ladies and gentleman, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.